Next White House science adviser on Letterman

This segment from Letterman is from back in April, but given the word that John Holdren, former AAAS head, will be running Barack Obama's Office of Science and Technology Policy (i.e., serving as chief science adviser to the president), it's worth a replay. This is a man who will be repeatedly reminding the president that climate change is not something that can be placed on the proverbial back burner. I mean, check out his c.v.

Along with Stephen Chu as energy secretary, Obama will be getting the best advice possible on the biggest public policy challenge in history. (Carol Browner will probably turn out to be a fine energy/climate coordinator, but I'm more impressed with the scientists Obama is surrounding himself with.)

So, yes, Obama's choice of a homophobic, creationist to pray at his inauguration is disappointing, especially to those gay Americans who worked so hard to help put Obama in the White House. But I suspect it's all about winning the trust of members of Congress like Heath Shuler (my congressmen here in western North Carolina), the so-called "Blue Dog" Democrats who skeptical of the secular approach to government. If we're lucky, this kind of window dressing will be the extent of Obama's overtures to the evangelical elements.

As for me, I'm keeping my eyes on the big picture, and the selection of Chu and Holdren speak volumes about Obama's approach to that picture.

Here are an excerpt from a monster of an essay Holdren wrote for Science a few months back on national science and technology policy, which turns out be a remarkably prescient thing to write about:

Stabilizing atmospheric CO2 at 500 ppmv would be possible if global emissions from fossil-fuel combustion in 2050 could be cut in half from the mid-range business-as-usual figure of 14 billion metric tons of carbon in CO2 per year. Numerous studies of how reductions of this general magnitude might be achieved have been undertaken (59), and, notwithstanding differences in emphasis, virtually all have shown that: (i) such reductions are possible but very demanding to achieve; (ii) there is no single silver-bullet approach that can do all or even most of the job; (iii) it is essential, in terms of both feasibility of the ultimate aim and cost of achieving it, to begin reductions sooner rather than later; (iv) the quickest and cheapest available reductions will be through improving the efficiency of energy end-use in residential and commercial buildings, manufacturing, and transport, but costlier measures to reduce emissions from the energy supply system will also need to be embraced; and (v) without major improvements in technology on both the demand side and the supply side--and a major expansion of international cooperation in the development and deployment of these technologies--the world is unlikely to achieve reductions as large as required.

The improved technologies we should be pursuing, for help not only with the energy-climate challenge but also with other aspects of the energy-economy-environment dilemma, are of many kinds: improved batteries for plug-in hybrid vehicles; cheaper photovoltaic cells; improved coal-gasification technologies to make electricity and hydrogen while capturing CO2; new processes for producing hydrogen from water using solar energy; better means of hydrogen storage; cheaper, more durable, more efficient fuel cells; biofuel options that do not compete with food production or drive deforestation; advanced fission reactors with proliferation-resistant fuel cycles and increased robustness against malfunction and malfeasance; fusion; more attractive and efficient public transportation options; and a range of potential advances in materials science, biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, and process engineering that could drastically reduce the energy and resource requirements of manufacturing and food production (60).

Also urgently needed from S&T in the energy-climate domain are improved understanding of potential tipping points related to ice-sheet disintegration and carbon release from the heating of northern soils; a greatly expanded research, development, and demonstration effort to determine the best approaches for both geologic and enhanced biologic sequestration of CO2; a serious program of research to determine whether there are "geoengineering" options (to create global cooling effects that counter the ongoing warming) that make practical sense; and wide-ranging integrated assessments of the options for adaptation (61).

Adequately addressing these and other needs in the science and engineering of the energy-environment interaction would probably require a 2- to 10-fold increase in the sum of public and private spending for energy research, development, and demonstration (ERD&D) (62). This sounds daunting, but the amounts involved are astonishingly small compared to what society spends for energy itself (63). There are signs that the private sector is ramping up its efforts in ERD&D in response to the challenge, but for reasons that have been abundantly documented (64), the public sector must also play a large role in the needed expansion. Sadly, until now there has been precious little sign of that happening, notwithstanding abundant rhetoric from political leaders about new technologies being the key to the solution (65).